The Road Less Traveled
by Agent of the Apothecary
Summary: The greatest couple Hogwarts ever saw-intelligent, witty, attractive, and unwaveringly loyal. The only problem is that they never existed at all. / Five ways Cedric Diggory and Hermione Granger never met.
1. Mistress Aberbane

**Story**: The Road Less Traveled

**Chapter Title**: Mistress Aberbane's All-Soothe Burn Treatment

**Summary**: The greatest couple Hogwarts ever saw - intelligent, witty, attractive, and unwaveringly loyal. The only problem is that they never existed at all . . . Five ways Cedric Diggory and Hermione Granger never met.

**Notes**: All five are roughly in chronological order throughout Hermione's fourth year/Cedric's fifth year. This takes place directly after the First Task.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own.

* * *

_Boys_.

There they were, doing the awkward not-quite-making-eye-contact thing that boys did when they wanted to show affection but couldn't risk being observed by a _girl_. It made her very glad she was not a member of the male species, while at the same time she could feel her throat clog.

"You two are idiots," she mumbled under her breath, and backed away to leave them alone.

"Miss Granger!" Hermione turned to see Madame Pomfrey, hair frazzled to the point where it almost resembled Hermione's own, appear in the doorway of a similar curtained-off room on the other side of the tent. "Kindly hand me that ointment, right over there." As Hermione reached for the specified tube, there came a warbled gurgle from behind the Bulgarian curtain.

Madame Pomfrey shot the curtain a murderous look. "Miss Granger, please assist Mr. Diggory with his burns," she said, angrily twitching the curtain shut behind her.

And thus Hermione found herself, ointment bottle in hand, looking at Cedric Diggory's naked chest.

He was framed by the curtains around his own room, and she could feel a blush spreading. She silently thanked Merlin that it was windy enough that her red cheeks could be attributed to the day's windy conditions.

It was then she realized that most of Diggory's very pretty upper torso was covered in scattered burns. "Oh, those look awful."

"Thanks, Granger." At the wry tone, she met Diggory's eyes, and saw the burns extended up his neck and brushed lightly across the right side of his face. The left side of his mouth had tipped up in the corner.

"Sorry," she replied automatically, although her comment had been true enough. "Did Madame Pomfrey say what she wanted me to do?" She shuffled forward, and Diggory stepped aside to let her in before releasing the curtain. She shed her outer coat so as to have easier movement; the burns looked terribly painful, and she had no idea why Pomfrey had thought her capable of handling them.

"Something about an ointment," replied Diggory, who didn't look terribly convinced of her medical skill either. Hermione looked at the tube in her hand, and read the caption aloud.

"Mistress Aberbane's All-Soothe Burn Treatment: Using Distilled Murtlap Essence to Reduce Redness, Blistering, and Pain for Five Hundred Years." She shrugged, tore off her knit gloves, and dropped them on top of the chair she had draped her coat over. She had already removed the top of the ointment bottle and was depositing a dollop on the palm of her hand when she realized that she was going to have to apply it herself.

_Oh Merlin's socks_, she thought with uncharacteristic fervor, and the blush swept up her cheeks to cover her forehead. Muttering about wind wasn't going to save her this time, and from under the cover of her fringe, Hermione looked up at Diggory.

He was smirking.

If there was one thing that Hermione despised in boys, it was arrogance. With an almost growl, she slapped her ointment-covered hand onto his shoulder and shoved him backwards onto the 

small white infirmary bed. She had the momentary pleasure of seeing his smirk melt away into a wince. Feeling a blend of mollification and guilt, Hermione slathered a thick layer of ointment across his shoulder. Her fingers were always cold, and his skin, even through a half-inch of milky ointment, singed her fingertips.

_Oh, for goodness sake_. He may have been Cedric Diggory, Hogwart's Heartthrob-slash- True Triwizard Champion-slash- Golden Boy, but this was hardly a scene from a two-penny romance novel. For one thing, Hermione wasn't buxom and small-waisted and in her dressing gown, treating him after a dawn duel of honor.

The thought, though, made her grin.

"Something funny, Granger?"

She dropped the smile. "Nothing," she replied curtly, and spread ointment down his bicep.

If this _were_ a two-penny romance novel, right now they'd be sitting in front of a crackling fire in a library and Hermione would have to be fiery and spirited, a Modern Woman, who nevertheless had time to run about in nearly transparent nightgowns with her hair down in wild curls and Diggory would have to be her titled and tempered secret admirer who had just dueled a duke for her honor and while she was berating him for putting himself in danger, all the while managing to be deviously flattered, he would put his hand over her wrist and say irritably, "What are you doing?"

Dragged from her mental mocking of cheap novels, Hermione realized that she was grinning widely and her imagination had bled into reality.

"Granger, you're doing it again."

"Doing what?" she asked.

"Looking like you're trying not to laugh. Something funny about me having almost been roasted alive by a dragon?"

"No," replied Hermione, and she tugged at her wrist. "Not at all. May I have my hand?"

"Tell me what's funny and I will."

"Really," she huffed, and yanked experimentally on her hand. He was holding it securely, his thumb pressed over the pulse in her wrist, and he was starting to make her nervous. Her pulse skipped. He smirked.

"Either give me my hand or consign yourself to scars for the rest of your life," snapped Hermione, and pulled harder. Diggory surveyed her for a moment, apparently judging whether or not she would go through with such a threat, before loosening his grip. She slipped free, and smeared more ointment on her hand.

Oh dear. Hesitantly, Hermione brushed her fingertips across the upper right corner of his chest. The skin was pink from the burns and hot enough that even when her hand hovered without touching, she could feel the heat. Despite the fact that he was burned, his skin was deceptively soft. Hermione's inner eye recalled the scene of Two-Penny Hermione and Diggory, and unfortunately her imagination had chosen then to enact a searing kiss with much flailing of lace sleeves and maidenly protestations of Two-Penny Hermione, who nevertheless managed to kiss Two-Penny Diggory of his mind.

Hermione couldn't help smiling, and through her blushing she was laughing aloud at the rather ridiculous thought that Cedric Diggory, even in his two-penny romance form, could possibly ever want to kiss Hermione Granger, and she was laughing hard enough that her whole body was shaking with uncontrollable, rather hysterical laughter. As if any of them – Harry or Diggory or Krum, who sat there sometimes in the library, trying to look Scholarly and Studious but failing miserably when his fangirls erupted out of the stacks – would want to kiss her.

They had the whole school at their feet, what with this stupid tournament business. And – here the tears were beginning to fall out of the corners of her eyes – there was the possibility that none of them would every live to enjoy their female spoils because they couldn't _died,_ any one of them, all of them, and they were so stupid about trying to be heroic when there were loose dragons and spurts of fire and what did they think they were _doing_? Did they think it would secure them some sort of fame or eternal glory if they were roasted alive by an overly large reptile?

And she must have garbled at least a portion of this aloud because a second later Diggory's thumb was brushing across her cheek and he was murmuring something that Hermione couldn't hear over the pounding of her heart in her ears and then he said, right into her ear, "We're not going to die."

Hermione hiccupped.

"I am, however, going to scar horribly if you don't help me with this Mistress Aberwaffle rot."

"Aberbane," corrected Hermione in a watery voice, and she could feel herself blushing. She blubbered all over _Cedric Diggory_. Even if she wasn't so impressed by his status as resident Hogwarts Pretty Boy, he was still quite intelligent. And she was a fifteen-year-old girl all but groping a very attractive seventeen-year-old boy.

"Right," he said. "That's what I meant."

She smiled, and this time he didn't demand to know why. (Well, _of course_ he didn't. He was the reason, after all.)

* * *

_Thoughts?_


	2. Italy

**Story**: The Road Less Traveled

**Chapter Title**: Italy

**Summary: **The greatest couple Hogwarts ever saw - intelligent, witty, attractive, and unwaveringly loyal. The only problem is that they never existed at all . . . Five ways Cedric Diggory and Hermione Granger never met.

**Notes**: Entirely dialogue. _Italy_ is a real poem. Have read it. Was bored stiff. Obviously I Know Not of What I Speak in terms of great English poetry, because it's a classic.

**Disclaimer**: Not mine, never will be. _Italy_ belongs to Samuel Rogers.

* * *

"Ginevra!"

"Crookshanks!"

"Ginevra!"

"Crookshanks!"

"Gin—oomph . . . Careful, Granger. Turn corners that fast and you might get whiplash."

"My cat . . ."

"Big, ugly, pumpkin-coloured?"

"He's big and he's orange, but honestly, Crookshanks isn't _ugly_. He's different. Really, if you got to know him, he's not horrid at all."

"Being a darling doesn't make him any less ugly, Granger. And he just went that way."

"Oh, _honestly_. Wait, were you the one calling Ginny's name?"

". . . my cat, actually."

"Your cat is named Ginevra?"

"Need you sound so amused, Granger? My cousin read 'Italy' when she was fifteen. The name seemed tragically appropriate to her."

"Is your cat a pretty blue-eyed Persian?"

"Ha. Ha."

"I would check to make sure she didn't run off with Ernie Macmillian's. He's quite the feline Lothario."

"Your humor fairly wounds me, Granger."

"Well, that was the intention."

"And now that you've succeeded . . ."

"I'll leave you to your love-doomed cat."

"Really, Granger, can it."

"Just out have curiosity, have you even read _Italy_?"

"No, Granger, I have not."

"Hmph."

"Hold it. Just because I'm intelligent doesn't mean I have to enjoy reading 200-page poems. Have you read it?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"And what?"

"It was abominably boring, wasn't it?"

"It's a prize of English literature!"

"Not the question, Granger."

". . . Yes, all right, it wasn't very . . . engrossing."

"How tactful of you. My housemates didn't mention tact."

"And what's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Whoa, back up a little, Granger, that wasn't an insult."

"You know, it sounded remarkably similar to one. If you just _excuse me_—"

"Not while you're this angry about something. I just meant that when I asked my housemates about you, they didn't mention you were tactful."

"You asked your _housemates_? And I really don't care what they said, one way or another. So please let go of my arm, Diggory, and leave me to find my cat."

"Not until you forgive me for my obvious blunder."

"All right, I forgive you. Happy?"

"No."

"Too bad."

"Granger, I am perfectly willing to stand here and grapple with you to the end of eternity."

"Isn't a bit compromising for you to be found in this position? I could very well holler for Filch and have you tossed on your ear for sexual harassment."

"Ah, not afraid to take out the big guns, are we, Granger?"

"Got you to let go of me, didn't it? Good night, Diggory."

"All right, not that afraid, anyway."

"Diggory, please kindly release my arm. I thought we were over this. I would like to find my cat some time before midnight."

"Don't worry; I'm a prefect. I'll cover for you."

"That sounded suspiciously like an offer to break the rules. For shame, Mr. Diggory!"

". . ."

"Why are you snickering?"

"You called me Mr. Diggory."

"Well, that's your _name_, isn't it? What else am I supposed to call you? Snuggles the Rainbow-Coloured Badger?"

"How about Cedric? Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? _Cedric_."

"If I do, will you let me go?"

"Yes, Granger. If you say my name, I will release you to go off and find your bloody ugly cat."

"Cedric – you're a very manipulative person."

"Thank you, Hermione."

* * *

_Thoughts?_


	3. The AlmostMurderer

**Story**: The Road Less Traveled

**Chapter Title**: The Almost-Murderer

**Summary**: The greatest couple Hogwarts ever saw - intelligent, witty, attractive, and unwaveringly loyal. The only problem is that they never existed at all . . . Five ways Cedric Diggory and Hermione Granger never met.

**Notes**: What I know about the Third Crusade was mostly gathered from _Kingdom of Heaven_ and Wikipedia. So if in the, oh, three lines in which it is mentioned, something is wrong . . . I apologize.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own. (I would, however, like Cedric Diggory handcuffed to my bed. Mmmm)

* * *

**3. The Almost-Murderer**

Saying she was startled would have tied "Hermione, you're a girl" for Most Obvious Statement of the Year, had such a dubious honor been bestowed annually.

She was sitting (hiding) in her usual corner of the library, breathing in enough dust to level all of Hogwarts, a strand of hair wrapped around her index finger. She considered, going steadily cross-eyed, simply doing away with the mess and chopping it all off after the Yule Ball. It would be just as unattractive short as it would be long, and quite easier to maintain.

She had actually been attacked by a suit of armor before Transfiguration the other day. It thought she was a first year being mauled by a rabid kneazle.

Distracted as she was by the Meaning of Hair, the giggles and _clack_ of heels on stone failed to penetrate her ears; she was, therefore, completely off-guard when someone tall and breathing heavily crashed into her table.

She thought she managed quite nicely for someone suffering from cardiac arrest; she didn't shriek, although she _did_ manage to clear six inches of air between the backside of her skirt and the creaky library chair.

"Er," said her almost-murderer.

Hermione found it hard to breathe, let alone formulate a reply to a comment that was, even when one's brain was receiving enough oxygen, hard to reply to. She let air out through her teeth harshly, which was just enough to let the almost-murderer know that she had heard him.

"Sorry about that," continued the almost-murderer, who she was having trouble identifying because he was hiding his features – including house colors – behind a mop of mahogany hair and a stack of brightly coloured textbooks. "I'll be going now."

"_Sorry about that_?" Hermione found herself hissing. "You almost kill me and all I get is a '_sorry about that_'?" Possibly the strain of having a procrastinating moron and suicidal idiot as best friends was beginning to wear down her nerves.

"I didn't almost kill you," denied the almost-murderer, who nevertheless, sounded faintly amused by the concept. "I hardly touched you."

"Excuse me," replied Hermione through clenched teeth, "as I attempt to restart my heart." She slapped her left hand onto the tabletop, and it was then she realized that the lock of hair she'd been considering was still wrapped around her fingers, the end that had previously been attached to her head now settling against the dusty wood.

With her free hand, she attempted to ascertain where, exactly, the damage had been wrought. The almost-murderer was watching her with increasing amusement, but she ignored him momentarily. She found the hole, decided it wasn't large enough to really fret about, and unwound the hair from around her hand.

The almost-murderer noticed. "Ouch," he said. "Did you do that when I startled you?"

Hermione reminded herself to breathe through her nose. "Yes," she said, in an approximation of a calm voice. "I also cut off oxygen to my brain and suffered minor cardiac arrest." Hermione internally winced at the realization that she sounded a little like her dormmates. She quickly quashed this under the heel of her foot – whoever he was, the Almost-Murderer had come close to being the second man in history to murder someone by fright.

The first being, _obviously_, Sir Harold the Daft in the eleventh century, but really, it was debatable whether he actually killed his wife or simply sent her into a vegetative state - the books from that time period weren't very clear.

The almost-murderer was now definitely amused. "Really?" he asked.

"Yes, _really_," she snapped. There was a momentary lull, and the almost-murderer seemed to be inching towards the stacks, away from her. "An explanation would be nice," she finally said, glaring at him as she attempted to, once again, find house colors. "And a name; I'd like to know who tried to murder me."

"I didn't try to murder you," he repeated. "I was running away." He brushed back the mop of hair, and Hermione, through all of her righteous indignation, realized who exactly she was charging with manslaughter.

"And I'm Cedric Diggory. Haven't we met?"

"Yes," replied Hermione, her voice dulling. "At the Quidditch World Cup. I was with the Weasleys—"

"Granger, right?" he cut in. "You're Potter's friend."

She didn't bother affirming. She'd just accused _Cedric Diggory_ of attempted murder. She felt like curling up in the flobberworm section of the library, where no one had ventured (other than herself) in the past decade, and dying. Cedric Diggory, of all people. Ginny was going to laugh her head off.

If Hermione didn't die first.

"I was running from the fan club," continued Diggory, using the hand that had just brushed aside his hair to point vaguely over his left shoulder. "Madam Pince cut them off at the Lethifold aisle." His gaze locked onto the only chair not occupied by red-faced fourth year, book, or parchment. "Can I join you?"

Hermione waved vaguely. He politely sat, unlike any of her male friends, who seemed unable to do anything except sprawl. "I'm sorry for being so short with you, Granger. I've had to be a little short with females this school year." He settled his books on his lap, there being little or no space available on the actual table.

She tried to rumble up some sort of feminist indignation at his ego and wide-sweeping remark, but as he finish speaking, his lip twitched with a bit of self-deprecation. She sighed inaudibly, and politely piled her History of Magic reference books in a pile so he could put down his texts.

He looked over her scattered scraps of parchment. "Goblin wars?" he asked. "First through fourth or fifth through seventeenth?"

"Second, at the moment," replied Hermione, a bit surprised that he actually knew the distinction. Harry and Ron couldn't distinguish between the Rundleworth Classification and Swiss cheese. "I've got about four more inches of it before I get to the third." Talking about school effectively distracted her from contemplating the pull of attraction of the boy sitting across from her (she didn't fancy him; however, Hermione may have been a nerd, but she wasn't _dead_. Cedric Diggory was mind-numbingly attractive).

"Wasn't that assigned in the spring of fourth year?" asked Diggory, shoving aside his own texts to get a better look at the titles of her reference books. "And why do you have a Muggle studies reference book?"

"The tail end of the second Goblin war coincided with the Third Crusade," replied Hermione. "I was going to contrast Buil the Bulbous with—"

"Saladin," finished Diggory with her. He looked intrigued. "Are you viewing the Crusades relative to the trade issue or the religious? Or are you taking both and considering Buil the Bulbous's concubine Margery's effect on the goblin treasury?"

Hermione tried not to gape. Honestly, she did. Apparently, however, her acting skills were not up to par. "Yes," he said, grinning at her as his elbows found purchase between spare quills and slips of parchment, "I do have a brain, Granger. No need to be scraping pavement with that jaw."

She felt a little guilty for the misunderstanding, but decided to withhold her apology until she had grilled him enough on the Crusades to ensure that he wasn't pulling information out of air.

* * *

_Thoughts?_


	4. The Bathrobe Activist

**Story**: The Road Less Traveled

**Chapter Title**: The Bathrobe Activist

**Summary**: The greatest couple Hogwarts ever saw - intelligent, witty, attractive, and unwaveringly loyal. The only problem is that they never existed at all . . . Five ways Cedric Diggory and Hermione Granger never met.

**Notes**: Eh, was too lazy to research if the E in SPEW is Elvish or Elven. Can anyone help me out?

**Disclaimer**: I do not own.

* * *

It was two weeks before Christmas (the one time of the year when Hogwarts was generally drowning in treacle tart and candy canes) and he was scrounging for food. Cedric tried to find the irony in this, but decided to forgo the search in favor of devoting his thoughts to clinging to dark, shadowy corners. After getting to know a statue of armor on the third floor better than he'd really wanted to, Cedric decided to put all focus onto the task at hand. _Brain, brain, must remember to put in brain next time I leave the common room at three in the morning_.

He'd drawn the shortest straw, much to the amusement of his fellow dormmates. Their laughter and admonishments to "avoid meeting Filch under the mistletoe" followed him through the common room and out into the corridor. They never ceased to find humor in the fact that Cedric, Hufflepuff Boy Wonder, had the worst luck drawing straws, despite this being their sixth year of employing the practice.

Eventually he managed to find his way to the kitchen entrance, after narrowly avoiding a confrontation with Mrs. Norris by frantically dashing down a bleak corridor and skidding around the corner as noiselessly as possible. He scratched the pear, and its squealing was unnaturally loud in the emptiness of the Hogwarts night.

The portrait slid open marginally, just enough to allow his lean frame passage, and he had only just cleared his final slipper-clad foot when it slammed shut. Inside, the house elves were cooking the approaching morning's breakfast, huge pans roasting seventy sausage links sizzling alongside skillets flipping omelets the same volume as a dog the size of Fang.

It was almost unnaturally sticky in the kitchen, after the cool drafts of the corridor. He was blinking the moisture away when he realized that he was not the only Hogwarts student in the kitchen after hours. There was a figure in a red terry cloth robe seated at the huge table reserved for the express purpose of serving visiting students. Said figure was clutching a white mug of sloshing cocoa and gesticulating with both it and a sheath of slightly bent pamphlets in its other hand.

"– haven't noticed, Dobby?! It's all but inhuman!"

The figure quickly identified itself as female. A second after realizing this, Cedric was noting that the figure had a _lot _of hair, most of it piled and wrapped haphazardly around ten or so abused hair pins that looked ready to make a break for it.

"But Miss Hermy," cut in the high, disembodied voice of a house elf, "Miss Hermy, the elves like Hogwarts. Is very nice, Hogwarts, very very nice." The house elf, whoever it was, appeared to be distressed. "We likes it here," it squeaked, but was cut off as the hand holding the cocoa waved dismissively, and the hot drink's surface tension was all that kept it from falling onto the sleeve of the robe.

"Dobby, the house elves have been raised in a patriarchal system that is the wizarding superiority complex! Obviously the house elves aren't _used_ to the concept of being free, because it's been rendered foreign to them by the situation in which they find themselves!" The girl sounded as frustrated as her debate partner. "Are you telling me that house elves actually _want_ to be stuck in a household where they have no say over their own personal freedoms, where they cannot visit their families, where they are allotted no holidays and no breaks, where they are expected to _physically torture themselves_ if they don't fold the linen properly?"

The girl was obviously outraged. The cocoa rose up in a crest as her hand shook, and she slammed the mug onto the scarred table. Her freed hand rose up to angrily thrust back a few spare strands of hair that had escaped her overworked hair pins.

A passing house elf, loaded down with two huge baskets of brown chicken eggs, stopped to hover near Cedric's left elbow, and he came back to himself to realize that he'd been staring at the girl. "Does Master need any assistance?" inquired the house elf. Cedric winced as the elf's courteous tone drew the attention of the girl whose back faced him.

She whirled around, and the velocity turned out to be too much strain for her beleaguered hair pins. Half crumpled under the pressure, and the other five snapped cleanly. She harrumphed irritably, her eyes obstructed, as her bushy brown curls tumbled down to scratch her chin.

"Hullo, Granger," he said, his surprise at her identity melting away. From the handful of times he'd seen her in person – or heard one of his younger housemates complaining about her – he recognized the authoritative voice and mass of hair.

"Oh, Diggory," she replied, and once she'd palmed enough of her hair back to look at him properly, she evidently lost interest and turned back to her still-unseen companion and mug of un-drunk cocoa. He attributed the pink brushed across her cheekbones to the steam in the kitchen and the heat of her argument.

"Does Master need anything?" repeated the house elf who, despite bearing at least twenty pounds of egg with little effort, shot Granger a look of mingled fear and irritation.

Cedric pulled the scribbled list out of the pocket of his pajamas, and another house elf materialized on his right to snatch the list and disappear amongst the _clang_ and haze of steam hanging over the kitchen.

He found a cup of steaming cocoa thrust into his hand, and he was herded to the same table where Granger sat. She appeared to have been abandoned during the confusion over his arrival, because she sat alone, looking into her cooling cocoa as though it possessed within its depths the secret to eternal youth.

Cedric sat across from her, careful not to slosh his cocoa, and noticed a pile of pamphlets in front of her; they looked as though they might have been, several months previously, crisp and white. He tapped the top of the mug with his wand, whispering a cooling charm, and angled his head to get a better look. Across the top in curving letters was the title head:

"Society for the Protection of Elfish Welfare," he read aloud. The sip of cocoa he'd just taken managed to clog with the amusement in his throat, although he tried his best to hide it. He didn't see the need to be patronizing, which was why he swallowed his immediate response of "You must be fucking kidding."

"Yes," replied Granger, looking up at him with eyes the same color of her cocoa. Her mad gesticulating previously suddenly made perfect sense, as well as the irritation swallowing the house elf ranks. Judging from the slump of her shoulders, she'd been meeting a bit of resistance while attempting to implement the _rightfully deserved freedom of all enslaved house elves_, as promised on the front page of her pamphlet.

"Oh," he said, and she seemed to take heart from the fact that he hadn't abruptly laughed in her face. It made him wonder for a moment about how supportive Potter and Weasley were being about her efforts. Seeing as how he'd found her waving around a full mug of cold cocoa at three in the morning – alone – he guess that the singular force behind S.P.E.W. was Hermione Granger.

"Are you planning on actually drinking that, Granger," he teased gently, "or just challenge it to a duel?" She pulled her gaze from the bottomless depths of her cocoa to meet his amused grin with a stunted smile.

"My parents are dentists, so they don't really encourage eating much sweets," she replied, tucking her hands into the sleeves of her bright robe. She frowned at her cocoa. "And it's cold." It was added as an afterthought, and she appeared confused as to how such an event had occurred. From what Cedric had heard, Granger was something of a genius, so he suspected that lack of sleep had rendered her semi-unintelligible.

"Hey, Granger, have you actually slept in the past week?" He'd meant it as a joke, but when she guiltily avoided his eyes, he figured he must've hit the mark pretty accurately. "You haven't, have you?"

"Well." She paused, and burrowed deeper into the plush depths of her terry cloth robe. "Between classes, finding spells to keep Harry from dying, actually practicing said spells, and S.P.E.W., I don't have much time to schedule in sleeping."

Cedric took a moment to wonder if she actually scheduled 'sleep' in her planner – and people thought _he _was anal – but decided that announcing such a comment flippantly would probably not be the best way to approach the subject. "You know," he offered, his eyes brushing over where the ends of her hair melted into the deep threads of her bathrobe, "you won't be much help to Potter if you're dead on your feet."

A house elf appeared, laden with three layered trays of assorted cakes and sweets, as well as a few jugs of pumpkin juice. He thrust the tray onto the table, bowed to Cedric while consciously ignoring Granger, and vanished into the stream of his fellows. He added his half-empty mug of cocoa to a spare spot on the top layer, and levitated the entire messy structure.

Her voice stopped him. "Are you worried?" she asked, almost inaudibly. "About the tasks? About not . . . making it out?" She seemed to choke on the last sentence. Her pale hands had dug their way out of the robe, and they were shaking as she reached for the pamphlets. The reason why she wasn't sleeping came to him in one of his regular bursts of realization, and he sat back down heavily on the bench.

"Isn't it Potter's job to have nightmares, Granger?" Her eyes finally met his, through the crinkled shade of her hair, and they sparkled faintly. It gave her eyes a faint sheen. "If you don't sleep, the first one you'll have when exhaustion catches up to you will be far worse."

He didn't know why he was warning her, except that her hands were still shaking. The skin underneath her slaughtered fingernails – no doubt she saw them as sensibly short – was tinged faintly blue. Frowning, he tapped the rim of her mug of cocoa with his wand. Steam burst from the cup in a sticky cloud, and when she simply looked at him oddly, he swallowed his sigh and reached across the table to wrap her white fingers around the porcelain of the cup. The two were not unalike it shade, and as his fingers pressed between hers, catching the magical warmth, he was startled at the dark contrast between his hands and hers.

"I'm scared out of my bloody mind," he said a moment later, his arms still outstretched across the table. He waited a moment, and then untangled their fingers, the pads of his hands clinging to the warmth of the mug. "Try to get some sleep, Hermione."

* * *

_Have I mentioned yet that Cedric Diggory is at least four times as awesome as any other male character in HP? Why do they always kill the awesome ones? Why?  
_


	5. Possession

**Story**: The Road Less Traveled

**Chapter Title**: Possession

**Summary**: The greatest couple Hogwarts ever saw - intelligent, witty, attractive, and unwaveringly loyal. The only problem is that they never existed at all . . . Five ways Cedric Diggory and Hermione Granger never met.

**Notes**: Here we are . . . the fifth way, the very end. It's been lovely writing to you guys, who were absolutely terrifically open to this couple (which can, on occasion, be a problem. Don't know why . . . as Shikamaru would say, tch, troublesome. Oops, wrong fandom. Sorry. /end ramble) Anyway, enjoy.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own.

* * *

The last thing Cedric Diggory (as Cedric Diggory, that is) ever saw was the slightly dirty face of Harry Potter as the skinny fourth year leapfrogged over a headstone.

He barely even saw the flash of green that reflected off of Potter's glasses, and he never felt it enter his chest. One moment he was tasting his heartbeat in his throat, and the next he was mewling rather pathetically into the sympathetic brown eyes of a teenage girl.

Cedric backtracked. Rapidly.

_Where the hell am I?_ Only the question, fully formed in his mind, came out in a garbled whine from his throat. His tongue, when it struck the roof of his mouth, was pebbly and rough.

"Crookshanks! Oh god, I thought you were . . . You perfectly insensible cat!"

_Crookshanks_. He'd heard that somewhere before. Thinking, Cedric blinked up into the large brown eyes surveying him and realized that she was Hermione Granger, Potter's bushy-haired friend. It had taken him a moment to recognize her because, for some strange reason, he was looking up at her, and she was larger than he remembered. Not that Granger had suddenly packed on the pounds, but more precisely everything about her seemed to have grown in scale until she dwarfed him magnificently.

As her hand reached down and brushed across his forehead, Cedric realized that she had been addressing _him_ when she'd said Crookshanks, and for some reason his head was muffled against her hand and why in god's name was she six times his size? She looked older than he remembered, but only by about a year, and Granger couldn't have suddenly grown (six times six feet . . .) thirty-six feet in a year.

Then she was speaking again, muttering about cats having nine lives and the idiocy of the male species, and she was lifting him off pavement and Cedric's head swam not only because she swung him into her arms, or because she needed to exert little energy to do so, but because she _thought_ _he was her cat_.

He peeped out from under her elbow and saw blood smeared across the street and a car that he recognized from the fourth year Muggle Studies final parked in front of a pretty little white house and his gaze was more focused than usual, which didn't help his pounding head, and why was everything so goddamn _big_?

"Mum!"

Even though Granger's upper-arm was pushing his ears into his skull, he could still hear her as if she was shrieking directly into his eardrum. He winced, and she adjusted her grip so that the edge of his chin rested into the curve of her elbow, and her breast was pressing against where his arm should have been, only it wasn't there because it was caught underneath him and everything was so bloody confusing that Cedric winced his eyes shut and pushed his head into her arm.

He could smell Granger's perfume, and it was something more flowery than he would've assigned to a girl whose two best friends were boys, and then something _twitched_. It wasn't his arms or his legs and it felt sinuous and boneless and bloodyfuckinghell was that a _tail_?

Cedric mewled.

Granger must've misinterpreted the noise, because her hand began to stroke along his back, between his shoulder blades, and while at first he was irritated that she thought she could soothe him by petting him, it turned out to be more helpful that he'd thought. She was moving, 

swaying, and it felt disconcerting and not much safer than flying. He resisted the urge to latch onto her, and instead he focused on the brush of her fingers through his hair, only it wasn't his hair, it was his _fur_ because he had a tail, and mewled and was tiny and ohfuck he was a _cat_ and Cedric latched his fingers into her clothing.

Only he didn't have fingers, did he?

Granger hissed, but otherwise didn't release him. "I'm awfully sorry, Crookshanks, but you were hit by that car and I have to make sure you're all right before I can put you down."

Hit by a bloody _car_, was he?

Granger's large brown eyes appeared rather suddenly in his field of vision. They were drawn under straight eyebrows and framed by short, no-nonsense eyelashes that probably hadn't seen a thickening spell a day in their life.

They were rather nice, actually. Soft, caring. Like her hands.

Bloody fucking hell. He was so fucking screwed.

* * *

_Here we are . . . please leave me a nice thought at the end . . . I may or may not be returning to this fandom soon, because a multi-chaptered _Labyrinth_ epic has sunk its claws into me. But I will try_.


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